The ACG (www.acguanacaste.ac.cr /), a 163,000 hectare national park in northwestern Costa Rica, extending from 6 km out in the Pacific up to 2000 m at the top Volcan Rincon de la Vieja and down into the Atlantic lowland rain forest is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ACG is home to more than 325,000 species of plants and animals (2.6% of the world's biodiversity) and has grown dramatically from a 10K acre national park (formalised in 1971) to a global example of tropical biodiversity conservation, dependent upon, and inserted within, the development and economy of the local people. If you are interested in more information on the ACG, please visit the Guanacaste Dry Forest Fund website (www.gdfcf.org /). At the bottom of that page you'll find a button to donate to the ACG. "Every penny donated to GDFCF goes to forest purchase to expand ACG" - a very worthwhile investment!

I am a molecular ecologist, based at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada, and interested in tracking how ACG ant communities change here with elevation, temperature and time. I have been following this across three volcanoes in Guanacaste Province (Cacao, Rincon de la Vieja and Orosi) since 2008. My hope and intent is to continue this monitoring for the long term - using the GigaPan to document habitat in high resolution.

On this morning, left the truck at 8:15 and it took almost exactly 1 hr to hike up to the Cima - 500m up. We got the traps out and bait down by 9:45. It was very VERY still, and so many flies and hummingbirds around. Almost no cloud cover at all. The most commonly encountered ants were Gnaptogenys and thin Pachycondyla. Videos of Gnaptogenys, tiny Myrmicinae and small Dolichoderinae. Traps up at 2:30.